Obsolete?
For some reason, I checked out FaceBook this morning before I began my blog and there I came face-to-face with a friend’s post that the Oregonian will no longer be delivered on the Peninsula. Though we do not subscribe and so will not be directly affected, I did feel a pang. Among my continuing memories of this household is my grandfather and then my father and, until recently, Nyel bringing in the morning newspaper to read. The end of yet another era.
I immediately Googled the Oregonian to get ‘the rest of the story’ – as in is this a cutback in all rural areas or is it just here and is it because of a change in the paper’s policy or did they simply lose their delivery person and decide not to rehire? But, predictably, what popped up on my computer screen was “The Oregonian/Online Newspaper.” Enough said.
It occurs to me that all my life I’ve heard the wonders of new inventions that happened in my grandparents’ and parents’ lifetimes – automobiles, telephones, radios, airplanes, you name it. And while there was the occasional lament about what was being replaced and lost, the attitude was mostly positive. Nowadays, though, ‘new’ is replacing ‘old’ so rapidly that we can’t keep up and we are more likely to focus on the things that go missing. There were a lot of responses to that FaceBook entry. None positive.
A Local Treasure
I also thought about how lucky we are here to have a locally run (though not locally owned) weekly newspaper. The Observer is a treasure and I wonder if we all appreciate it enough. FaceBook notwithstanding, it still provides the best coverage of local events – city and county meetings, obituaries, new business openings, local accidents and crime. But there’s no doubt that times are changing and even little newspapers like ours are probably living dinosaurs.
An article I read in the Business Insider speculated that there may be a time when not only social media but “neighborhood blogs” (such as this one, I guess) will help fill the void as small newspapers fold (so to speak.) It went on to say:
People will have to learn to trust different news sources differently, and to hold people accountable for their statements … Officials and companies will have to learn how to communicate better. And people will have to learn to seek out different news sources for different topics.
As I ponder and ruminate, it occurs to me that even my university degree in journalism is now obsolete. Actually, it has been for years. I remember being annoyed (decades ago) when my alma mater, Stanford, changed the degree from “Journalism” to “Communication.” But… as it turns out, they were seeing the handwriting on the wall, so to speak. And, nowadays, you can learn all about their Communication Department online at info@commu.stanford.edu… Of course!
My grandparents took both the Oregonian and the Columbian in Vancouver. Likewise, my parents took both the Seattle Times and the PI daily as well as the Bellevue American weekly paper. And I majored in journalism as well. I guess we are lucky we don’t quite remember the dinosaurs!
Oh, and we currently take the Tacoma News Tribune and the Peninsula Gateway.
I, too, was irked when my journalism degree (from UO) was suddenly renamed and thr title Communications had taken its place. A whole different topic, it seemed to me, and one that didn’t require you to write well – but to Communicate…whatever that meant!. And breakfast without the Oregonian (even though I don’t like some of its recent editorial policies) and “communicating” with a computer is just not the same.
I’m a native Portlander and one of my
best memories is reading the Oregonian in the morning and the Oregon Journal in the afternoon. When I was little I’d stretch out on the living room rug to read the Journal front to back in the evening. I have always subscribed, even recently when the Oregonian became a sad shadow of its former self.
The new management clearly doesn’t give a rip about quality and thorough reporting. I’m very sad to say goodbye to this friend, but this friend is dying a slow death.